… The outcome has falsified the old prediction from the left that markets and innovation would make the working class miserable, or from the right that the material gains from industrialization would be offset by moral corruption…

… People believe, for example, that imperialism explains European riches. Or they believe that markets and greed arrived recently. Or they believe that “capitalism” required a new class or a new self-consciousness about one’s class (as against a new rhetoric about what an old class did). Or they believe that economic events must be explained “ultimately,” and every single time, by material interests. Or they believe that it was trade unions and government protections that have elevated the working class. None of these is correct…

Le vittime della tesi proposta hanno nomi e cognomi illustri…

… The book tests the traditional stories against the actually-happened, setting aside the stories that in light of the recent findings of scientific history don’t seem to work very well. A surprisingly large number of the stories don’t. Not Karl Marx and his classes. Not Max Weber and his Protestants. Not Fernand Braudel and his Mafia-style capitalists. Not Douglass North and his institutions. Not the mathematical theories of endogenous growth and its capital accumulation. Not the left-wing’s theory of working-class struggle, or the right-wing’s theory of spiritual decline…

… The Big Economic Story of our times has not been the Great Recession of 2007– 2009… The Big Economic Story of our own times is that the Chinese in 1978 and then the Indians in 1991 adopted liberal ideas in the economy, and came to attribute a dignity and a liberty to the bourgeoisie formerly denied. And then China and India exploded in economic growth…

… “economic change in all periods depends, more than most economists think, on what people believe.” The Big Story of the past two hundred years is the innovation after 1700 or 1800 around the North Sea, and recently in once poor places like Taiwan or Ireland…

Più importanti dei fattori materiali…

… And contrary to the usual declarations of the economists since Adam Smith or Karl Marx, the Biggest Economic Story was not caused by trade or investment or exploitation. It was caused by ideas. The idea of bourgeois dignity and liberty…

… Virgil Storr and Peter Boettke note about the Bahamas, “Virtually all models of success to be found in the Bahamas’ economic past have to be characterized as piratical,” with the result that entrepreneurs there “pursue ‘rents’ rather than [productive] profits….

… Bernard Mandeville and Ivan Boesky got it wrong. Prudence is not the only virtue of an innovative society. People (not to speak of grass and bacteria and rats) have always been prudent, and there have always been greedy people among them unwilling to balance prudence with other virtues…

… Greg Clark, Jack Goldstone, Joel Mokyr, and I reply that, no, large trades were commonplace in the Mediterranean or the Indian Ocean for centuries before the stirring of Atlantic trade, yet resulted in no sustained industrial revolution… trade, which was routine in the Ottoman Empire, or coal, which was routine in China…

… I write books trying to change people’sminds. If we were consistent materialists we would put down our pens and start offering people large bribes to become liberals…

Obiezione: le idee seguono l’innovazione anziché precederla.

Un esempio del contrario: la Costituzione americana…

… The U.S. Constitution, for example, as the historian Bernard Bailyn argues, was a creative event in the realm of ideas— and its economic origins are easily exaggerated. “The Atlantic democratic revolutions of the later eighteenth century,” writes Jonathan Israel, “stemmed chiefly from a general shift in perceptions, ideas, and attitudes,” a “revolution of the mind…

Altro esempio del contrario: l’abolizione della schiavitù…

… The abolition of slavery, a policy once advocated merely by a handful of radical churchmen (and the Baron de Montesquieu), played in the 1820s and 1830s a role in British politics, and later of course a much bigger role in American politics. It had less to do with the North’s material interests than with cheap printing… As Lincoln famously said on being introduced to the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”…

… Books can indeed make big wars; as another example, Erskine Childers’s spy novel, The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service (1903), was no minor influence on the Anglo-German naval rivalry…. Various nationalisms had spread across Europe in reaction to Napoleon’s conquests, but then were matured in poetry and songs…

… Greg claims that Mokyr and I have “no account for why the Industrial Revolution waited so long.” Oh, yes we do. We say that social ideas changed in a thoroughly liberal direction for the first and only time in history during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, first in Holland, then in England and Pennsylvania, and then Massachusetts, Scotland, and the world. They changed for reasons that were sometimes material (London was unusually big and strong when the bumbling Stuarts came to the throne) and sometimes non-material (Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hume, and Smith lived and wrote as they did) and sometimes both (Protestant presses vied with Catholic ones for new readers)…

… Greg Clark says that cheating in China means that the “bourgeois virtues” I touted in the book of the same name (2006) aren’t the ticket. But cheating was rampant in England in the early seventeenth century, as it is in most poor countries…

La letteratura rende bene il fenomeno…

… Look at the Bard’s obsession with dishonesty, in honest, honest Iago, say, or Falstaff’s robbery and exaggerations, or Shylock’s contract and Portia’s quibble…

Fu dopo che le cose cambiarono…

… Late in the seventeenth century Quakers and other worthies drove dishonesty underground, and gave us the modern world. The very word “honesty” changed in meaning, from “aristocratically glorious” to “sober and truth-telling.”…

… To say that China is a counterexample because it “seems set soon to take its place among the developed countries” is strange. At a daily production of $ 13 a head (the United States now is at $ 130 a head), it’s going to be a long, long time before China looks “developed.”…

… economists don’t acknowledge how productive it is to “discuss your creative interests with those around you” and to work so that “society encourages everyone to engage in their own personal process of creative development.”…

… project is to shift attention away from the allocative answers that economists love…towards the creative questions… I call it the Bourgeois Revaluation arising from a new Bourgeois Dignity and liberty, expressed as a change in the Bourgeois Virtues, and resulting in the Great Fact of wider scope for creativity in the Bourgeois Era…